The status of women directors has received relatively less airtime and press space compared to the perennial woe expressed over the paucity of women playwrights represented on Broadway (or Off, for that matter) and in regional theatre seasons.

Patrick Healy’s recent New York Times article, “Staging a Sisterhood” (2/3/11 issue, print edition), draws important notice to a crop of women now working more frequently on higher profile productions.  Wonderful artists like Leigh Silverman (Chinglish and the upcoming The Madrid, with Edie Falco), Anne Kauffman (Detroit), Pam MacKinnon (Clybourne Park and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf), Anna D. Shapiro (August: Osage County), Rebecca Taichman (Luck of the Irish), and many more seem to be finding their way into broader public consciousness, often by collaborating with the host of talented women playwrights now populating the American theatre scene.  Annie Baker, Amy Herzog, Kirsten Greenidge, Bathsheba Doran, Madeline George, Katori Hall, Lisa D’Amour, Lisa Kron, Lydia Diamond, Tanya Barfield, and many more women writers are galvanizing audiences with their stories and widening our sense of how theatrical narrative works and the people on whom it can focus.

But when Roundabout Theatre’s Artistic Director Todd Haimes tells Healy, “I don’t feel an old boy’s club exists any more,” I fear he’s being disingenuous, even though he admits, “but statistics might disagree.”  While the women interviewed for Healy’s article paint a generally hopeful picture of their career prospects (only Tina Landau, who most recently directed Paula Vogel’s Civil War Christmas at New York Theatre Workshop, calls directing a “male-dominated tradition”), let’s admit it:  the glass ceiling persists.

“’Can we call it growth when we say the 2011-12 season saw three women directing plays on Broadway as opposed to one woman in 2001-02?’ asked Laura Penn, executive director of the union representing stage directors and choreographers.”  (Healy, NYT, 2/3/13)

No, we frankly can’t call it growth.  Is the current “trend” a happy bubble that will burst at the next sign of recession, when producers worry about declining profits and fear they can’t entrust women with their budgets?  And if women directors’ fortunes are tied to those of the talented women playwrights with whom they collaborate, can we ignore the statistics that continue to track these playwrights’ compromised, constrained successes, which rarely happen on Broadway?  Theresa Rebeck remains the only woman playwright able to open a play on Broadway without years of development workshops and productions that move from Off-Off to Off- to maybe London to, on the rare occasion for playwrights who aren’t Rebeck (or Wendy Wasserstein before her), Broadway.

The New York Times also reports that stars like Al Pacino and Scarlett Johansson increasingly wield the real power to bring shows to Broadway, but are mostly interested in revivals that allow them to attempt the roles they’ve long wanted to play.  Pacino felt he was ready to take on Shelly Levene in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross and Johansson, too, said “now felt like the right time for me” to play Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; both are now starring in Broadway revivals.  Because Pacino got a hankering to do Mamet, producer Jeffrey Richards bumped his planned Broadway production of Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit, which was produced (beautifully) last fall at Playwrights Horizons instead.

What does this “star casting” trend mean for plays by women and their collaborating women directors?  Richards admitted it was much easier to raise the requisite money to do Mamet, with Pacino in the lead, than it was to finance Detroit.  And the Times article underlines how much power these stars accrue given how hungry producers are for hits in an economic environment in which only 25% of Broadway productions turn a profit.  Which producers will risk new plays without star casts–especially those written and directed by women?

Women directors who run theatres perhaps have a bit more sway.  Healy cites for example Lynn Meadow at Manhattan Theatre Club and Sarah Benson at Soho Rep.  Scanning the regional theatres, we could also mention Diane Paulus, who is interviewed in Healy’s article and directs on Broadway mostly by transferring productions from ART, the theatre she runs in Cambridge.  Emily Mann, the longtime artistic director at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre, transferred Having Our Say in 1995 (receiving three Tony nominations in the process) and recently directed Streetcar Named Desire with an African American cast on Broadway.  Garry Hynes and Mary Zimmerman, two of the handful of women who’ve ever won the Tony for Best Director, both transferred to Broadway productions they developed with their own companies (the Druid and the Lookingglass, respectively, for Beauty Queen of Leenane  and Metamorphosis).

Women directing new plays somehow seems a natural fit, but how often do we see women directing the canon, especially on Broadway?  Karin Coonrod has directed in the Public Theatre’s Shakespeare cycle and mounted classics at ART, but for Broadway, Daniel Sullivan gets the nod (Merchant of Venice).  Susan Stroman and Kathleen Marshall can successfully direct Broadway musicals, probably because they’re primarily known as choreographers, which is a more gender-neutral or even female-friendly field.  But they’ve never, to my knowledge, crossed over to direct straight plays (certainly not on Broadway).

The high profile Julie Taymor/Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark debacle haunts this scene, too.  I don’t think Taymor’s plight caused problems for women theatre directors, but it underlined the issues that already exist.  Taymor is enormously talented, a truly visionary theatre and film artist.  But the Spiderman producers got away with calling her “difficult” and “emotional” in ways that would never pertain to a male director, even if he was being stubborn and highhanded and running millions of dollars over budget.  Gender stereotypes continue to haunt women theatre artists of all stripes in ways that keep that glass ceiling hovering low.

For those of us interested in innovative theatre; in plays that tell new stories in new ways; in directors with a visual sense that makes something vivid and new out of the old proscenium stage, Broadway might not be the best place to expect the women artists we admire to succeed.  But the resources available on Broadway, not to mention the salaries, working conditions, benefits, and essential visibility, make it difficult for women directors, playwrights, and designers not to aspire to those mid-town stages.

As Healy’s article demonstrates, women directors and playwrights are flourishing elsewhere, as they have for so long.  I loved writer/director Tina Satters’ Seagull (Thinking of you) at the New Ohio Theatre during January’s Coil Festival in New York. Satter created stunningly original stage pictures, and her colloquial, queer adaptation of Chekhov’s play sounded poignant and new, performed by a female and gender-ambiguous cast that she directed with warmth and empathy.  I’d be delighted to see Satter write and direct in a large, resource-rich forum like Broadway.

I also love the work created by Page 73, and the now-disbanded 13P, and the thriving, determined Clubbed Thumb, and the increasingly well-received, significant, venerable Women’s Project.  Their production of Laura Marks’s Bethany, directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch at City Center, is a smart, beautifully executed production of a play with a razor sharp, feminist critique of the American economy.  The Women’s Project even makes its own bid for star casting in Bethany, with America Ferrera (of TV’s Ugly Betty fame) proving her stage chops in the leading role. Why doesn’t this production transfer to Broadway?

Like it or not, even in 2013, our stereotypes of “the theatre director” continue to be male.  Smash, the NBC TV series created by Theresa Rebeck, began its second season last night.  The preview press touted its new show runner, Josh Safran, fresh from Gossip Girl, and promised a new and improved run of episodes.  But all the old tired theatre stereotypes persist so far.  Derek (Jack Davenport), the mercurial director of Bombshell, the musical suffering development hell, gets called out for sexually harassing his cast members, after bedding one would-be leading lady and then almost seducing the other.  He’s “the director” writ large, the auteur whose vision won’t be tamed; the cruel taskmaster whose exacting standards “get” the requisite performances from his women, even after he makes them cry; and of course he’s white, male, and heterosexual.

This stereotype isn’t true–we know that all Broadway directors aren’t Derek.  But the point is that the stereotype persists.  When people think of a Broadway director, the image of someone like Derek is already there, intractable, resisting efforts to erase it or to remake it into something more diverse.  Those stereotypes can be very persuasive in the imaginations of people bankrolling risky, expensive projects.

It’s not that women directors don’t have the pedigree.  Of the directors profiled in Eric Grode’s sidebar, “Meet the Directors,” which accompanies Healy’s Times article, many refer to graduate degrees from Yale School of Drama or NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.  These women have impeccable credentials and they’re impressively talented.  What else could explain their relative lack of power and Broadway exposure but the glass ceiling?

Don’t you wish we could retire that old metaphor?  Don’t you wish the glass ceiling would shatter like a trick stage prop, never to be reassembled?  Without that barrier, what kinds of stratospheric success might women directors and playwrights accomplish?  Wouldn’t it be great to know?

Imagine if women were employed regularly and visibly at all levels of American theatre.  Imagine if they were routinely trusted to share their talent, their vision, their methods, their dramaturgical skill, and their emotional, political, and intellectual acuity.  How might American theatre change?

Of course, many of us have been practicing that “what if” exercise for decades.  Are we still stuck here, excited about articles that feature women we’ve followed for years?  Wouldn’t it be something if we didn’t have to applaud simple attention to women, if their theatre work was expected, typical, unremarkable?  If we could just talk about the work, instead of about the fact that it’s been produced at all?  Years ago, I wrote a piece that took an ungenerous swipe at Julia Miles, the founder and then artistic director of the Women’s Project, because she imagined a time when her theatre’s advocacy for women would no longer be necessary.  Decades later, I have to say I know what she meant–and I agree.

Would that companies like the Women’s Project could persist not because they have to, but because they want to continue creating fertile space for women theatre artists to learn and grow.  Would that the glass ceiling could be smashed and replaced by a ladder on which successful women would help one another into positions of increased power and visibility and that they could all stay there and thrive.  Would that the persistently unequal demographics that describe the gender (let alone race and ethnicity) of those working in the theatre would finally balance out, so that we wouldn’t be so thankful for just a few women’s successes.  50/50 in 2020 indeed.

Call me liberal; call me utopian; call me, maybe.  Or call me a feminist critic on a life-long mission that’s not over, yet.

The Feminist Spectator

Although I hadn’t yet seen it when the Oscar nominations were recently announced, I was already miffed that Kathryn Bigelow wasn’t among those listed as Best Director contenders for her movie about the capture of Osama Bin Laden.  Here was the first woman director ever to win the award, in 2010, for The Hurt Locker, obviously being snubbed despite directing one of the most acclaimed, talked-about, Best Picture-nominated films of the year.

Now that I’ve seen Zero Dark Thirty, I’m even more perplexed by Bigelow’s absence from the list.  The film is a smart, richly nuanced, morally complicated cinematic version of a story from recent political history.  Bigelow’s vision, in concert with artistic partner Mark Boal’s eloquent script and Greig Fraser’s cinematography, makes the film the tense, suspenseful recitation of the events that culminated in Bin Laden’s assassination.  Zero Dark Thirty is also a fascinating, compelling glimpse into the workings of a government agency hell-bent on retribution with few resources with which to collect necessary information after the Obama administration ended the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques that were ubiquitous under Cheney and Bush.

Some speculate that the political backlash against Bigelow’s film might have robbed her of the Oscar nomination.  The New York Times noted that the heat from Congress and the media, in fact, has prompted screenwriter Boal to retain a lawyer.  Bigelow made a smart, articulate public statement in which she argues that “depiction isn’t endorsement” when it comes to the representations of torture to which some politicians and critics have objected.

I wonder, too, had a man directed Zero Dark Thirty, if the film’s exacting scenes of coercion would be so controversial.  Impossible, of course, to know, but I find myself disquieted along with others who’ve pointed out that even Oliver Stone’s inquiries into the Kennedy assassination and other political debacles weren’t targeted with quite this level of cross, chastising congressional venom.

Bigelow’s defense of her film almost mirrors the gendered polarities faced by Zero Dark Thirty’s heroine, Maya (Jessica Chastain), the CIA operative who tenaciously follows an intelligence lead to Bin Laden’s hiding place in a compound outside of Abbottabad, Pakistan.  Maya is often the only woman on the scene, whether in the “black sites” where the CIA tortures its detainees or in the headquarters in Washington where various men in suits ignore her presence unless she speaks up.

In an amusing but telling scene in which Maya is among a group of agents meeting with the CIA director for the first time about their intel, when Maya asserts herself, the director asks, “Who the hell are you?”  She retorts, “I’m the motherfucker who found him.”  The director—played by James Gandolfini wearing amusing makeup and a hair piece to make him look like his character—chuckles, his admiration for Maya quickly won.

Maya is the hinge on which much of the film’s moral and ethical debate swings.  In the much discussed opening scenes, she and a seasoned colleague, Dan (in a terrifically vital performance by Jason Clarke), question a Muslim detainee who’s been in custody long enough to already be a bloody, soiled wreck.  Dan sweetly cajoles and then cruelly wounds the poor man, repeating and enacting his mantra, “If you lie to me, I’ll hurt you.”  The poor man, Ammar (Reda Kateb), is water-boarded, beaten, and encased in a box not much bigger than a standard issue Fed Ex package when he refuses to provide information.

Bigelow’s camera carefully observes Chastain’s Maya endure her first torture session, as her face subtly registers her horror at the behavior in which her presence makes her complicit.  But when Dan leaves and she’s left alone with Ammar, she refuses the empathy the prisoner solicits.  “Your friend is an animal,” he groans.  Maya doesn’t touch him—she never inflicts physical pain—but she sides with Dan when she tells Ammar that his treatment won’t improve until he provides the information they need.

Bigelow refuses, in other words, to burden her film with a righteous or essentialist feminist critique of violence as only masculine.  Her film doesn’t condone torture.  She documents it as a fact of history.  She represents it and honors the real female CIA operative on whom Maya’s character is based by giving her a steely resolve and an unshakable determination to follow her intelligence until it leads her to Bin Laden.

Maya works for 10 years, across the history told by Zero Dark Thirty, barely lifting her gaze from her computer screen and rarely leaving Pakistan and Afghanistan.  She sacrifices everything for her work.

As FS2 remarked, the film includes no romantic attachments for its leading character, and even her friendship with her one female colleague, Jessica (Jennifer Ehle), follows a more masculine model.  The two circle around one another warily at first, when Maya joins the team as an outsider/upstart.  But they grow to respect and admire one another, and Maya’s screensaver toward the film’s end depicts their finally warm relationship.  At one point, Jessica asks Maya if she has a boyfriend, but Maya demurs.

Maya’s focus on her job compromises her health and her happiness, but Bigelow and Boal paint her as a consummate professional with total devotion to her job and her mission.  In that, she becomes a 21^st century feminist hero working in an agency still bound by 1950s gender assumptions.  But her intelligence and tenacity prevail.  Interesting, too, to see Chastain inhabit the lonely, isolated, singular hero shots typically reserved for men.

Chastain’s stark, pale white beauty helps make a character who could be remote—and in fact is, from many of her colleagues, though her camaraderie with others of them is nicely conveyed—interesting accessible and captivating.  Chastain’s cuts a willowy figure, and Bigelow and cinematographer Fraser often frame her curling red hair against swirling dun-colored desert dust.  But her beauty is slightly off-kilter; her eyes are round and large, and her lips are full and rectangular, which leaves the planes of her face to create a visual and emotional tension that makes Chastain more than a conventionally beautiful white woman.   And her emotional and intellectual acuity as a performer keeps you focused on her reactions.

Some of Bigelow’s choices seemed odd; for instance, I found it hard to believe that Maya would drive herself, alone, from her security-guarded domestic quarters to her work site, without even wearing a head-scarf in the semi-public space of her car.  In other public scenes, Maya wears an unexplained black wig or does cover her hair.  But the film never really clarifies the precarious place of a Western white woman in the patriarchal Middle Eastern culture in which Maya works for so long.

Maya has a close hold on her emotions, no doubt because of those agency gender politics.  When the Navy Seals who invade Bin Laden’s compound successfully assassinate him and bring his body back to their base in a bag, Bigelow and Boal allow the squad rather typical, macho male expressions of exultation.  Maya can’t afford such displays.  Her earlier delight in getting the green light for her long-awaited mission is subdued—Chastain portrays Maya’s excitement with a sharp intake of breath and by enlarging her already wide eyes.  Even as she watches the mission progress on her computer screen at the base, when she hears on her monitor that the Seals have got Bin Laden, Chastain plays Maya’s pleasure more as incredulity, mixed with a dawning, stunning realization that she’s achieved her goal.

When they return from their successful mission, Bigelow directs the Seals to park Bin Laden’s body bag on a cart at the back of the tent while they unpack the spoils they’ve retrieved from the compound.  She frames a shot of the cart left strangely by itself and unattended, considering the body it carries and the terror wreaked by the the man it once was.  When Maya approaches and unzips the bag, she looks at the corpse’s face and simply nods to a colleague, confirming its identity.

Bigelow and Boal downplay these moments of affirmation.  They never show Bin Laden’s face directly, making no attempt to have the actor and a make-up artist try to approximate his reality.  (Here’s terrific essay from the New York Times by the actor who played Bin Laden.)  The camera focuses on Maya and her reaction to the corpse—and on the Seals, when they invade his compound—keeping the focus on those who executed the raid, rather than inviting spectators to find prurient pleasure in what’s represented as an almost quotidian killing.

The Seals do their job, moving from floor to floor in the compound, killing two men and one of the women, corralling the many children in the house and falsely reassuring them that everything is okay.  When they reach the third floor and kill the third man, it’s only after he’s dead that the squad’s leader turns to the soldier who fired the shot and underlines the history he’s just made.

No political celebration marks the film’s end.  Bigelow and Boal don’t cut to newspaper headlines or media reports or show scenes of gloating CIA operatives.  When the mission is over, Maya stands on an isolated runway alone, approaching a transport plane that arrives to retrieve her from Pakistan.  The eager young pilot says she must be very important, as she’s the only passenger on his manifest, giving her the whole, uncomfortable belly of the plane to herself.

As she buckles in and the plane takes off, Bigelow focuses in on her face, letting us watch, in one final take, as Maya lets her emotions well into choked sobs and tears that roll down her face.  In private, once she’s accomplished her mission, Bigelow implies that Maya can feel everything she’s repressed through the ten years of her quest.  In that final moment, Zero Dark Thirty shows its conscience, admitting that vengeance, too, has its costs.

A searing film like this, made by a woman about a woman’s single-minded quest to bring down one of history’s most reviled terrorists, deserves all the notice it gets.  And Kathryn Bigelow certainly deserved a Best Director nomination.

The Feminist Spectator

I’m not a Les Miz person.  That is, I don’t know all the words to the show; I can’t keep the characters straight; and I didn’t see the Broadway production until well into its run, when the actors seemed tired and the audience was mostly comprised of people who didn’t speak English.  I wasn’t, in other words, waiting with baited breath for the film adaptation.

But since my girlfriend is a feminist musical theatre scholar, who happened to write a bang-up op-ed about the film’s gender politics for the Washington Post, I did of course see the film and can’t help but weigh in from my own non-specialist position.  Stacy (Wolf), of course, is right (despite all the horrible flaming and feminist-bashing on the Washington Post comment section under her essay)—the women do nothing but provide a passive romantic background for the central action of the male characters.

That said, Anne Hathaway, in her brief appearance as the doomed Fantine, really does put over that song.  As she sits up from her most recent degradation, shaking off the stench of the man who’s just raped her (throwing coins at her as he leaves), she convinces you that underneath her poverty-driven (and obviously make-up department produced) grime, she’s a golden-hearted woman who just fell on bad times.  Her voice is lovely, but mostly, she acts the song, and she’s a terrific actor—that’s what makes it so effective.

But pauvre Anne!  To see her beautiful hair shorn off by the horrible, manipulative also-poor people to whom she has to turn to raise money to pay her debts; to see her fall into prostitution; to see her degraded at every turn as she tries to provide for her child . . . it’s probably a good thing she’s only in the film for 45 minutes.  How much more abject can you get?  And is one good song worth it?

Hugh Jackman is sweetly sincere and quite believably tuneful as Jean Valjean, the wronged ex-convict who has spent 19 years in hard labor because he stole a loaf of bread for his sister’s starving son.  His religious conversion, once he’s released on parole, persuades him to begin his life anew, using the silver he’s stolen from a kind-hearted priest to seed his new, righteous business and political ventures.

But what about all that religiosity?  What about all those close-ups of Jesus on the cross, and the two times Jackman/Valjean shoulders large heavy wooden objects highly reminiscent of Jesus’s burden?  Why make him so obviously a Christ figure?  And why play out this battle to the death between Valjean and Javert, his former jailer, on the basis of their separate but parallel beliefs that they alone are doing god’s work?

I don’t know why I’m asking why—the narrative wants to redeem both men, as well as the abject Fantine, by giving them religious alibis.  All those songs about going home to god sound a bit too reminiscent of contemporary evangelicalism for my taste.  Why not comment on all that, or do something creative with it, instead of faithfully (if you will) pointing up and even emphasizing the musical’s religious undercurrents?

Likewise, what about that obsession Javert has with Valjean?  How homoerotic is that?  Is Javert so eternally preoccupied with his nemesis really just because Valjean skipped out on his lifelong parole and defied Javert’s power?  And hey, why don’t these guys have wives?  Why does Javert kill himself when he realizes that Valjean’s kindness means that his own quest for vengeance now has no meaning?  Sounds suspiciously like tortured love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name to me.

Javert’s obsession and Valjean’s continual flight from his vigilante justice becomes comical in the film, given that the even though we’re told that eight or nine years pass between various scenes, Javert keeps hovering about in Valjean’s life like gas from a bad meal.  And the film’s set—created on a sound-stage—is so claustrophobic and visually one-dimensional, it looks like none of the characters ever move house.  Instead, Les Miz seems like a French-inflected, music-accompanied, Hugo-inspired version of Groundhog Day—the characters wake up to repeat the same scenes over and over again, which makes it difficult to sustain any kind of narrative tension.

Eddie Redmayne (My Week with Marilyn) does a nice job as Marius, the would-be revolutionary who’s actually an aristocrat.  Redmayne’s fleshy lips and yearning countenance—on a face full of interesting planes that reminds me a bit of Willem Dafoe’s—let him play wounded, dreamy longing very well.  And Redmayne, too, turns out to have a decent enough voice to make it through Les Miz’s endlessly repetitive songs.

But the politics of his character go unremarked in the film.  Valjean saves him from the King’s men’s assault on the barricades by carrying the wounded younger man on his back through the sewers as Marius’s comrades die.  When the so-called revolution ends, however, Marius returns to the upper-crust family he’d foresworn (and course of gets the girl, the lovely, loyal Cosette, played with worried longing by Amanda Seyfried).  After one song where he mourns his fallen fellow fighters, he’s back in his grandfather’s estate throwing a grand old wedding party.

Although the film ends with the dead risen and returned to the barricades in a faux demonstration of revolutionary fervor for democracy, liberty, and equality, the film’s politics are only ever conservative.  The rich thrive, the poor die, the uprising fails, the guy gets the girl, the father dies so that his adopted daughter can marry (too Oedipal for my taste), and the credits role.

I guess I’m glad I saw Les Miz—one has to, given that it’s already a front-runner in the season’s awards derby.  But really—Best Picture?  I don’t think so.  The whole thing seemed so fake, without signaling that it intended to be so two-dimensionally theatrical.  The sound-stage effect make the narrative (and nearly every frame of every shot) feel claustrophobic, and director Tom Hooper’s legendary close-ups became disorienting and exhausting.  I felt like I’d spent nearly three hours sitting too close to my television.  (I finally agree with Charles Isherwood about something:  see his Arts Beat post about his reaction to the film in the New York Times.)

But awards predictions and buzz take on a life of their own.  Hathaway deserves a nomination for her performance.  And Samantha Barks, who plays the lovelorn Éponine is terrific.  She starred in the role in the West End stage production; her chops as a musical theatre performer, unlike most of the cast, shine from the screen.  The actors, though, are uniformly good, even Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter, who step up gamely to play Eponine’s parents, the silly innkeepers who harbored Cosette reluctantly and then seek to profit from Valjean’s adoption of the girl.

Baron Cohen and Bonham Carter fall into easy sync as the film’s comic foils, picking pockets, stealing jewelry, and peeing in the liquor they serve with fluidly filmed, rhythmic choreography.  Would that Bonham Carter could stop repeating her turn as Mrs. Lovett, in Tim Burton’s film adaptation of Sweeney Todd.  But it was nice to see Baron Cohen performing a maniac in someone else’s script for a change, even if his singing was more Rex Harrison-style than Broadway.

Only Russell Crowe is disappointing as the villain, Javert, though Stacy tells me that the role is difficult in the best of circumstances.  Crowe seems stiff and embarrassed by this style of singing, even though he hits all the right notes.  His face is strangely devoid of emotion, or maybe, like the music itself, his performance is just one-note.  He looks uncomfortable, even constipated, even in the scenes when Javert prowls high above a (very inauthentic looking) Paris skyline, contemplating his faith and his fate.  Maybe it’s all that repressed homoeroticism upsetting his system.

Les Miz is such an easy film on which to focus acclaim and approbation.  It announces its importance at every turn, from the grand opening scene where enchained men pull on thick ropes to bring a faltering ship into harbor under Javert’s cruel gaze, to the end of Act One, when the revolutionaries prepare their fight against the king, to the finale, when those now dead martyrs resurrect themselves to gild a much expanded barricade and deliver the rousing finale.

But it’s not really about anything.  And the stories it does tell—about gender, especially, and about the futility of revolution, particularly—are tired and even offensive.

Films like Les Miz (and Django Unchained, which is next on my agenda) need to be seen.  But I regret spending nearly three hours on a movie that never persuaded me not to resist its insistent self-aggrandizement.  After Anne Hathaway left the screen, try as I might to give in and just go with it, there just didn’t seem to be any point.

The Feminist Spectator